We present DS SERVE, a framework that transforms large-scale text datasets—comprising half a trillion tokens—into a high-performance neural retrieval system. DS SERVE offers both a web interface and API endpoints, achieving low latency with modest memory overhead on a single node. The framework also supports inference-time tradeoffs between latency, accuracy, and result diversity. We anticipate that DS SERVE will be broadly useful for a range of applications such as large-scale retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), training data attribution, training a search agent, and beyond.

Luca Soldaini, Rodney Kinney, Akshita Bhagia, Dustin Schwenk, David Atkinson, Russell Authur, Ben Bogin, Khyathi Chandu, Jennifer Dumas, Yanai Elazar, Valentin Hofmann, Ananya Jha, Sachin Kumar, Li Lucy, Xinxi Lyu, Nathan Lambert, Ian Magnusson, Jacob Morrison, Niklas Muennighoff, Aakanksha Naik, Crystal Nam, Matthew Peters, Abhilasha Ravichander, Kyle Richardson, Zejiang Shen, Emma Strubell, Nishant Subramani, Oyvind Tafjord, Evan Walsh, Luke Zettlemoyer, Noah Smith, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Iz Beltagy, Dirk Groeneveld, Jesse Dodge, Kyle Lo. Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2024.

Although large language models can be prompted for both zero-and few-shot learning, performance drops significantly when no demonstrations are available.In this paper, we introduce Z-ICL, a new zero-shot method that closes the gap by constructing pseudo-demonstrations for a given test input using a raw text corpus.Concretely, pseudodemonstrations are constructed by (1) finding the nearest neighbors to the test input from the corpus and pairing them with random task labels, and (2) applying a set of techniques to reduce the amount of direct copying the model does from the resulting demonstrations.Evaluation on nine classification datasets shows that Z-ICL outperforms previous zero-shot methods by a significant margin, and is on par with incontext learning with few-shot labeled training data.Overall, Z-ICL provides a significantly higher estimate of the zero-shot performance levels of a model, and supports future efforts to develop better pseudo-demonstrations that further improve zero-shot results. 1

Sewon Min, Kalpesh Krishna, Xinxi Lyu, Mike Lewis, Wen-tau Yih, Pang Koh, Mohit Iyyer, Luke Zettlemoyer, Hannaneh Hajishirzi. Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2023.

Large language models (LMs) are able to incontext learn-perform a new task via inference alone by conditioning on a few input-label pairs (demonstrations) and making predictions for new inputs.However, there has been little understanding of how the model learns and which aspects of the demonstrations contribute to end task performance.In this paper, we show that ground truth demonstrations are in fact not required-randomly replacing labels in the demonstrations barely hurts performance on a range of classification and multi-choce tasks, consistently over 12 different models including GPT-3.Instead, we find that other aspects of the demonstrations are the key drivers of end task performance, including the fact that they provide a few examples of (1) the label space, (2) the distribution of the input text, and (3) the overall format of the sequence.Together, our analysis provides a new way of understanding how and why in-context learning works, while opening up new questions about how much can be learned from large language models through inference alone.

Daniel Khashabi, Xinxi Lyu, Sewon Min, Lianhui Qin, Kyle Richardson, Sean Welleck, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Tushar Khot, Ashish Sabharwal, Sameer Singh, Yejin Choi. Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies. 2022.